Your Right to Know

It was not on the public schedule for the Republican National Committee’s spring meeting in
Memphis, Tenn. But inside a hotel conference room, a group of conservative women held a boot camp
to strengthen an unlikely set of skills: how to talk about abortion.

They have conducted a half-dozen of these sessions around the country this year, from Richmond,
Va., to Madison, Wis. One of their tips: Keep remarks as short as possible.

“Two sentences is really the goal,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B.
Anthony List, the anti-abortion group that hosts the boot camps. “Then stop talking.”

Social issues have taken on added urgency since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby
case last month, which held that family-run corporations could not be required to pay for insurance
coverage for contraception. Although Democrats hope the decision will help them draw Republicans
back into an uncomfortable debate over women’s rights, many conservatives welcome putting abortion
at the center of the midterm elections.

That approach cuts against the counsel of others in the Republican Party, who have warned
candidates to tread gingerly around divisive social issues, a lesson from the intemperate comments
like the one about “legitimate rape” that cost the party in 2012.

But a vocal group of social conservatives, dismayed both by their party’s apparent
dismissiveness of their passion and by the Democrats’ success at portraying Republicans as
prosecuting a “war on women,” are rewriting the anti-abortion movement’s script. They are urging
greater compassion for women with unplanned pregnancies and aggressive confrontation whenever
Democrats accuse them of opposing women’s best interests.

Republicans acknowledge that their communication on women’s issues has been inadequate.

“The best way to talk about the life issue is to have female candidates talk about it,” said
Elise Stefanik, who won a Republican congressional primary in upstate New York last month. “And it’s
very important that we have candidates who are respectful when they talk about this issue and that
they talk about it in a humane way. And I think that’s where the Republican Party has failed in a
certain way.”